Managing time by managing yourself
Raise your hands if you feel 24 hours a day isn’t enough to tackle your to-do list.
The key to time management to you may mean just staying afloat and barely surviving each day to avoid chaos. But both of us know this is just a ticking time-bomb and things can spiral so fast.
We have all been there, done that.
But there has to be something more than just ticking off things on the to-do list and playing catch up with your schedules, right?
Managing time by managing self
With just 24 hours a day, many of us cannot figure out how to do everything that we want to. Despite all our good intentions, this rat race is not going to be helpful in the long run when you reach burnout, or worse.
Let us talk about a not-so-new concept that works wonders for me, mindful time management, or as I prefer calling it self management.
To me, time management is a little deeper than just doing things at the right time. Time management includes
- DOING things
- doing things at the RIGHT TIME
- doing the RIGHT THINGS; most important of all,
- doing them in a way that enriches our life and provides meaning to our life.
Here are 4 principles that help me manage my life and time, and add a sense of purpose to my existence.
Big Picture
It is easy to lose the sense of the bigger picture when we get lost in the mundane everyday ho-hum. If anything the last two pandemic years has taught us, it is not to take the precious, fleeting life for granted.
As Annie Dillard puts it “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”
Photo by Ian Schneider
Understanding the big picture will help you realign your priorities and purpose of life.
Managing your day-to-day activities without losing the sense of awe about life is the way to treat yourself and your life in all its preciousness.
Mindfulness
I resonate with the words of Jimmy Buffett “Go fast enough to get there, but slow enough to see.”
Once you realize that the bigger things matter more to you in life, you typically slow down and be mindful of how you interact and spend time with those few activities, things, or even people.
It gives us a chance to contemplate our personal values, purpose of life and priorities in life, and then realign our actions and routines to match them.
Being mindful of what you do stops you from reverting to your habitual behaviors and knee-jerk reactions. It helps you correct your automated responses to intentional efforts.
It also makes you reflect on your daily routines and weed out or reduce the time spent on non-productive, redundant, or even harmful activities, thereby helping you carve out more time for things you want to do.
Conscious Connection
Mindfulness also helps you reconnect with your social and physical surroundings. And the impact it has on other people is tremendous.
And it is no news that most of our day-to-day activities revolve around and depend on other people and their cooperation. This interconnectedness is what makes the world go around.
Photo by Vlad Sargu
Being kind and mindful of your conscious actions, words, and thoughts towards other people goes a long way in improving your relationship with them. You get to re-evaluate every single relationship of yours and engage with only those that give you joy and purpose.
Maybe some relationships have an expiry date!
It also means connecting to the inner YOU. Self-care and self-love are often under-rated. Treat yourself with the kindness and compassion that you want others to treat you with, consciously.
Manage your energy
Despite all our best efforts, we are not built to be our best, all 24/7. Most of us hate Mondays for a reason!
Our energy levels ebb and flow throughout the day, and we can be intentional about how we harness our energy to do our best. Learning about your energy level trends can take some time but it is worth it.
Schedule your highly demanding activities that require your focus and attention at your peak energy hours, and managing to take an intentional break when you are at a trough will help you hit your maximum efficiency.
As you might have guessed by now, none of these principles are quick fixes.
But that’s true with any time management tool. These are just a means to an end – the end being your life’s full potential. How you use these principles to create a better life rests entirely on you.
If you have anything to add or comment on, you are welcome to join the discussion.
Or if you want to take this further, feel free to connect with me.